In the last few years
there have been an increasing number of small
regional audio shows springing up. Many of them come
out of the home brewing community, some of them out
of the more mainstream commercial high end
community, but they're all making an attempt to
unite people in a common love of audio.

The Capitol Audiofest in
the Washington DC area is one of these smaller shows
that is becoming bigger, to fill a void left by some
of the larger high end audio events that have
disappeared in the past few years.

The Audiofest took place
at the Crowne Plaza in Rockville, a fairly new hotel
that seems to have been built in precast concrete
modules, so each of the rooms has concrete walls.
(This is a great thing in terms of isolation between
rooms but not necessarily in terms of internal room
reflections). Various rooms were set up, mostly by
individual audio dealers. This meant that were were
a lot of different setups, but often people in one
room would know a lot about one product in the chain
but nothing about some of the others. I got a chance
check out most of the rooms but when a room is run
by a dealer showing a large variety of different
products it's difficult to check everything out in a
limited time like I had. Consequently, this review
may miss a lot of good and important products and is
only meant to be a small sampling of things I heard
at the show and liked. I'm an audio production guy
more than a home hi-fi guy, so I come into this with
a certain set of biases too.

I met a friend of mine
from the audio production community there, and he
came up to me and asked, "Is it just me, or is 90%
of the stuff here sounding horrible?" I had to nod
and agree with him, and point out that this is no
reflection on a show which is trying to do its best
to improve that, but it's a reflection on the state
of the whole high-end community as a whole.

This isn't a place for a
long screed about how I think the high-end community
is being sidetracked into worrying about the wrong
things and into some very misguided design
practices. Maybe I'll write that up here in these
pages some time in the future.

But, I wish I could do
to you readers what I did to my friend. I took him
up to the third floor to listen to the Soundfield
Audio booth. Because, although 90% of the stuff at
the show, and maybe 90% of the stuff in the high end
world in general, didn't sound very good, the
Soundfield Audio room sounded very good.

Speakers

Soundfield was showing
the 1812 Overture, which was a very interesting
three-way system. On top was a 12" coaxial driver
(and it's a very, very good coaxial driver with some
interesting engineering to make for a clean top
end), and a sub woofer below. These combined to make
for a system that has very even and flat dispersion,
that is the frequency response remains very much the
same as you get off the main axis of the speakers.
But, they have added a small full-range radiator to
the rear of the top box, which adds some energy into
the diffuse field much the way planar dipole
speakers do. The effect was a soundfield very
reminiscent of a planar speaker, but with a much,
much wider sweet spot. When my friend heard them, he
smiled.

This is a speaker that
will make you smile. Why hadn't I heard of these
guys before?

Now, I have said earlier
that that many of these shows more or less
originated with the DIY community and I don't know
if that's the case here, but there were a few
companies showing that seemed to be folks who were
taking their DIY projects public. Also, there were
two demo rooms run by a local organization called
DCAudioDIY. These guys were showing off a lot of
home brew projects and I have to say some of them
sounded better than the stuff in the
professionally-run rooms. There was a small
D'Appolito design, an infinite baffle speaker that
sounded far better than an infinite baffle design
has any right to, and a lot of very well-built
amplifiers and the like. If you're ever in the DC
area and just want to talk about home brewing I
would look these guys up.

Also, let me say that
there were very, very few rooms that did any room
treatment at all. I saw some foam here and some very
badly improvised high frequency damping in places,
but most of the dealers made no attempt to deal with
the horrible acoustics of the hotel rooms. I'd like
to extend a hand also to the DCAudio DIY folks for
making a serious attempt at dealing with the
problems.

There were a number of
rooms with speaker systems that may have been great,
but the room issues were too severe to make any
judgments about them.

This was especially a
problem with large horn-loaded systems. Volti Audio
was making a horn-loaded speaker that looked to be
of the La Scala II basic design. Beautiful
construction, some great craftsmanship, but it
wasn't really possible to tell much in such a small,
boomy room. Incidentally, the Volti Audio booth had
a Platines Verdier turntable, the first one I'd ever
actually used. It was beautifully constructed, and
although it was unable to play my torture test disc
cleanly, that may just have been setup. It did well
enough and sounded good enough that I definitely
want to try it under better conditions.

In a similar range, the
folks at Classic Audio Loudspeakers are making a
reproduction of the classic JBL Hartsfield
loudspeakers, as well as reproductions of some of
the JBL exponential horns with with acoustical
lenses. Unfortunately they didn't have them on
display but they did have folks there able to talk
about them. (They did have some of their own designs
on display, but again ran into the same problem with
speakers designed for a large room not working well
with the small concrete hotel rooms).

The only planar speaker
I saw there (and you may note here that I have a
considerable bias toward planars) was the GT Audio
Works GTA2, a planarmagnetic speaker with a ribbon
tweeter and two woofers added. It sounded very
bright but very clean. That brightness might have
been the result of the room (and it's clear they
were trying to improvise some room treatment), and
the speaker is definitely worth investigating.

I got a chance to hear
the MBL 116 Radialstrahler Elegance loudspeaker for
the first time. This is a speaker with a very
strange set of midrange and treble drivers,
involving a large number of ribbons intended to
produce an omni-directional pattern. The sound was
clean and even and I couldn't hear any real
aberrations as I moved up and down, forward and
back. This is a speaker a lot of people have talked
to me about over the years but actually listening to
it just whetted my appetite for hearing it under
better conditions.

I got to hear the Gallo
Stratus speakers with their TR1 subwoofer. It's
interesting, whenever I hear anything from Anthony
Gallo, it always looks very bizarre and improbable,
and it usually sounds a whole lot better than you'd
expect for the way it looks. The Gallo speakers were
being demonstrated by Pierre Sprey of Mapleshade
Records who is similar in some respects himself in
that he always comes out with strange and bizarre
ideas but in the end winds up with good sound.

Audio Note UK was
showing the Audio Note Model E. It was a bit hard to
find the room since there were several rooms marked
"Audio Note UK" but only one with the Audio Note
speakers in use, but it was worth it when we found
it. Simple small two-way monitor speaker with a dome
tweeter that was clean and understated.

Philharmonic also had a
small floor-standing three-say system with a planar
midrange, ribbon tweeter, and cone bass driver.
Recessed sound, not in your face at all with a good
image and really quite natural overall. Again, I'd
like to hear it in a room without a flutter echo and
see how it really performs.

Oh, and Sonest also had
a small two-way system using a ribbon tweeter with a
wooden waveguide assembly front. It gave good sound
with a reasonable sense of space from a small 5W
amplifier and also seems well worth checking out.

Amplifiers

Just about every
amplifier I saw anywhere was a tube design. There
were a couple of new solid-state amps. Charles Rollo
from Swap Meet Audio was demonstrating Lenahan Audio
speakers with the new Arion Audio solid-state amps,
for a very clean sound (and some of the few non-spitty
dome tweeters I heard at the show). Aurender was
showing their S-10 off. But beyond that, there was a
lot of tube stuff.

Audio Power Labs had on
display their 833TNT, a huge power amplifier using
833 transmitting tubes. They didn't have them
available to listen to, unfortunately, and while
they had their excellently-built smaller 50NT
amplifier set up, it was hard to tell much about the
sound under show conditions. I continue to be
fascinated with the whole idea of using the 833 for
audio, since it was originally used for audio in big
transmitter modulation decks and seems a good choice
for high power applications where you have the room
and power for a triode.

Bob Carver's company,
bobcarver.com, is now making a very solid-looking
line of conventional tube amplifiers. They look
clean and well-designed and with a lot of attention
paid to output transformers. How do they sound? Who
can tell?

I saw Atma-Sphere MA
1.5, a 7241-based power amplifier. I've always liked
the way Atma-Sphere gear sounded, and I wish I could
have actually heard this one but it was not possible
at the time.

Border Patrol is a new,
small company in Maryland that is making what looks
like some very promising new tube amplifiers. Again
I couldn't really tell much in a quick hotel room
demo but they look to be solid designs with
attention paid to things like careful power supply
design which will directly affect the sound.

I wish I could say more
about amplifiers since there were so many of them at
the show, but the sound of an amplifier is (or
should be) subtle and show conditions are not
conducive to making subtle comparisons.

Tape

I saw a surprising
amount of open-reel tape there, from a guy in the
swapmeet section selling used 4-track consumer tapes
from the sixties and seventies on through several
booths which were using an open-reel machine for
source material.

United Home Audio was showing off their UHA-HQ
recorder, which looks like it is based upon the
Tascam BR-20 machine. They've replaced the original
head stack with a custom half-track head stack, and
done some new custom electronics inside. They're
starting with a decent solid platform which,
although it may not have originally been up to
professional standards, is much better than any of
the consumer open-reel machines made. They then have
set it up so it can be used in the modern audiophile
world.

I got a chance to hear the MBL 116 Radialstrahler
Elegance loudspeaker for the first time. This is a
speaker with a proprietary set of carbon fiber
midrange and treble omnidirectional drivers. The
sound was clean and even and I couldn't hear any
real aberrations as I moved up and down, forward and
back. This is a speaker a lot of people have talked
to me about over the years but actually listening to
it just whetted my appetite for hearing it under
better conditions.

Recordings

There were a large
number of record dealers there selling everything
from old cutouts to current audiophile pressings.
This included a new internet dealer, Entertainment
Destination, which specializes in new vinyl.

But, what made me
happier than anything else at the show was finally
meeting Todd Garfinkle from M-A Recordings. He uses
simple two-microphone technique with some
hand-constructed microphones based on DPA capsules,
and gets some really staggering results, to the
point where I would say he has consistently made
some of the best sounding small ensemble recordings
that I have ever heard. A cut off of a recording he
made of Begona Olavides is one of my standard test
tracks and it was an absolute pleasure and honor to
meet him in person.

As I mentioned above,
Pierre Sprey from Mapleshade was there selling the
latest of the Mapleshade albums as well as the Gallo
speakers. And Mark Waldrep from AIX Records was
there. AIX is pioneering the multi-format disc,
making DVDs containing many different mixes that can
be played with various playback system
configurations so that you always have the recording
mixed properly for your configuration rather than
relying on some sort of automatic up mixing or down
mixing features.

Randomness

Benchmark was showing
off some stuff, and while I think of Benchmark as a
top-grade studio products vendor, they also make
some A/D hardware like their DAC1 USB and DAC1 HDR
for home use. I have nothing but the best things to
say about their products in general and I was very
pleased to see the DAC1 HDR which is a line stage
with a DAC and headphone amp in one small box.

The Bel Canto equipment
was all over the place... power amplifiers, DACs,
preamplifiers. I've liked their gear in the past and
I wish I'd had the time at the show to look at the
newer generation of gear.

There was a large swap
meet section down on the first floor in which people
were selling all kinds of used gear, from some
fairly high end stuff to some stuff that we made fun
of in the seventies. I loved the mix of gear and I
loved watching people from very different parts of
the hobby socializing together. Some of the speaker
systems in the swap meet were.... peculiar to say
the least.

Oh, and I want to say
that although they didn't have a room, folks from
Voice Coil and AudioXPress supplied free magazines.
If anyone is even remotely interested in home
building audio, I highly recommend these mags.

Conclusion

I heard a lot of things
that sounded pretty bad, two things that were
patently fraudulent, and a couple of salesmen who
clearly did not understand basic physics. But,
that's how the high end world is, and finding a few
gems out of the dross is what makes it fun. There
were a couple of gems here that were well, well
worth the trip.